Tag: javascript

This is an awesome browser and text-based Star Wars game written in JavaScript. I love how it provides good on-boarding instructions to help you advance through the various skills needed to succeed at this game.

Every week JavaScript Weekly’s newsletter comes packed with links to latest happenings in the JavaScript community, new JavaScript libraries that are really cool, tutorials on how to improve your JavaScript programming, and videos from conferences or other presentations. I really like it.

With AJAX being all the rage in today’s web applications, several toolkits have been developed to make Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) calls and dynamic HTML (DHTML) easier on the developer. Today we had a discussion in my ISys 532 Information Architecture class on the recently Open Sourced Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and its impact on enterprise web development. We talked briefly about a few other alternatives. While I don’t have extensive experience in all of these Javascript frameworks, here’s my take on each.

1. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – This is a full-stack Java to browser toolkit that creates your browser independent Javascript from your Java code. If your application is already in Java, this might be a great toolkit for building AJAX rich, cross-browser compatible web apps. It features reusable UI components, its own Remote Procedure Call protocol that allows you to write all of your logic in Java, browser history management that won’t break the back button with AJAX calls, debugging, JUnit integration, and Internationalization libraries.

2. Yahoo! UI Library – This is different from the Google Web Toolkit in that it isn’t meant for a specific server-side environment. The Yahoo! UI Library gives developers tools to quickly create cross-browser user interface components. It has some nice widgets for drop down menus, drag and drop, and animation. The UI Library also features some nice css layout managers as well as css normalizing files. You can pick and choose which parts you want to use in your application. If you want some quick, standard 2 column layout templates, the UI Libraries are great. The Connection Manager also provides some nice libraries for performing asynchronous calls to your back-end server.

3. Prototype JavaScript Framework – This is one of my favorite JavaScript frameworks available. Prototype provides libraries for simple AJAX/AJAH calls to your back-end server. My favorite feature is its simple element targeting syntax. Finding an element in the DOM is super simple, and form manipulation is a breeze. There are also many other Javascript products that are built on top of the Prototype framework such as windows, rico widgets, and scriptaculous effects. Prototype is also the JavaScript library of choice for Ruby on Rails and CakePHP. This provides full-stack back-end to browser development similar to what Google’s Web Developer Toolkit is for Java. Prototype makes JavaScript programming fun again.

4. Dojo, the Javascript toolkit – Dojo is a full fledged JavaScript framework that combines the power of Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Rico, although it’s not built on the Prototype libraries. Dojo gives you the entire package in one. It provides some nice widgets including a rich text editor, calendars, color pickers, special combo boxes, form validation, trees, menus, fisheye lists (similar to Mac OS X’s object doc), and google/yahoo maps. It’s a great library if you are looking to use lots of custom form widgets. It also has built in support for quick RPC calls using JSON instead of XML. JSON RPC is the passing of serialized JavaScript objects across the network.

5. Adobe Labs Spry framework – I was recently introduced to this cool new AJAX framework created by Adobe. Spry takes a slightly different approach to AJAX applications. The syntax takes more of a tag-based approach to displaying and updating data. It takes advantage of XPath technologies to parse and render xml data that is loaded from the server. This approach is like XSL transformations done by JavaScript. It appears to make xml data updates very simple. I believe it would integrate well with any Ruby on Rails or CakePHP application as well. This is definitely a technology that I will be watching over the next few months.

Does anyone know of any other Javascript framework that should be mentioned here?